LUCY – The Review

How can a film exist somewhere between being an ambitious Hollywood oddity and a wacky hot mess of a film? Days after seeing Luc Besson’s new film LUCY I’m still trying to figure this out. Going into a Besson film you have to expect a strong female-centered action-fest. The French director has made a career of this going back to LA FEMME NIKITA, to THE FIFTH ELEMENT, all the way to his more recent Indiana Jones and Allan Quatermain inspired period piece THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURE OF ADELE BLANC-SEC (which exists relatively unnoticed and is worth checking out if you’re a fan of pulp adventure stories). However LUCY kind of exists in a different conversation than these previously mentioned films for a lot of reasons. First of all, despite her stunning features, Johansson’s Lucy is nowhere near as memorable as some of the leads in these other films. But the most obvious difference is the simple fact that LUCY is such a bizarre movie even for a director known for occasionally dabbling in risky material.

If the opening shot of what is believed to be the earliest form of humanity drinking from a creek doesn’t signal that we might be in for more than what the trailers for the film have promised, just wait till Besson starts cutting back and forth between shots of a crime deal in a hotel and deadly animals hunting one another in the wild. Scarlett Johansson as the title character is the unlucky lady who gets coerced into delivering a briefcase to a gang of Asian mobsters led by Choi Min-sik (OLDBOY, I SAW THE DEVIL). The tense showdown culminates in her being forced to act as a drug mule for a new drug that is described as a chemical mothers inject into their child naturally during pregnancy. It’s described as igniting new cells through reactions between existing cells. All doesn’t go as planned when Lucy is kidnapped on her way to the airport by other bad guys (I guess?) – this girl has the worst luck – and hit and kicked in the stomach by her captors. And just as you can expect, she suddenly experiences extreme changes in her mental and physical self due to the large dosage now streaming through her body.

The premise of the film explains that humans only use 10% of our brains. You will need less than 10 minutes to do a little bit of research and find out that that statistic is completely made up. Of course this doesn’t stop Besson from announcing throughout the film her gradual mental increase from 10% to 20% and so on and so on. While much of the “science” explained in the film by a researcher played by Morgan Freeman is treated in a serious tone, LUCY also seems to be smirking a bit at the audience. Some of the sequences and dialogue are so outrageous and occasionally silly that you almost get the feeling that the film is poking fun at the idea that its presenting. There’s a fun and breezy manner to how the film effortlessly bounces between pseudo-intellectual theories, car chases, evolutionary theories, and gun battles. Fans hoping for a more action-centric thriller like the trailers seem to promise might be disappointed that LUCY at times feels more comfortable sitting in an art-house theater and getting high while watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY than pretending to be a Liam Neeson or Jason Bourne wannabe.

LUCY may strive at times to be a “big idea” film like THE MATRIX or the previous mentioned Kubrick masterpiece, and while it doesn’t come close to the lofty heights of those films, you have to applaud the film for striving to be more than most of the films that Besson has produced as of late (TAKEN 2, COLOMBIANA, LOCKOUT). Many critics will be quick to compare this to TRANSCENENCE from earlier this year; especially considering the theme represented by the ending. But while that film from earlier this year got wrapped up in its own long and boring lectures, LUCY keeps it short and entertains far more in 90 minutes straight than just 5 minutes of that earlier slog.

Even amidst all the highbrow intellectualism, there are plenty of exploitation elements that make this feel like a trashy grindhouse film. Johansson runs around in a see-through white top with exposed black bra for almost the entire film and shoots more innocent bystanders than actual bad guys – for instance a cab driver gets a bullet to the head simply because he can’t speak English. It is moments like this where you find yourself with your mouth agape more than you mind expanding like our superhuman heroine.

Depending on your mood, you might be more open to some of the heavily stylized visuals and directions Besson and cinematographer Thierry Arbogast take it. Watching animals being born or stalked by rival beasts as seen in LUCY can be taken out of context and seem absolutely ridiculous. However the film delivers such imagery with such confidence and gives off a feeling that it knows exactly what it wants to be – even if the audience is constantly in-flux as to where they might fall with their opinion on the film.

3 out of 5

LUCY is now showing in theaters everywhere